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Running out of harddrive space again!

I'm blaming it all on Steam this time, and for once not huge emulation rom sets. Although the whole MAME set has continued to grow a lot this year.

Steam had had some great discount offers recently. Whole game series collections, such as this weeks Red Faction collection, then there was the huge QuakeCon bundle. It quickly started to eat up the HDD I've got set aside for game installations. So it looks like another 2TB drive is on the way to be dedicated to games.

So now my main PC will have 7TB! (1TB boot drive + 3x 2TB data, work and game drives).

And my other main systems now have:

My server has 8.5TB (500GB boot drive and 4x 2TB data/media drives).

And the emulation PC has a further 6TB (1TB boot drive and 1x 1TB + 2x 2TB drives for rom file collections).

That totals 21.5TB storage space. Nice. Also have other systems with additional storage, but can't really count that.

So anyone else still having HDD space issues? Or don't you really install much new, or you have acres of space left over for a rainy day? I did have loads of room free until the Steam bundle deals this summer, and I know I don't need to have every game from my Steam account installed at once, but as a lot of them were new purchases its nice to have them available to play.

If you haven't played a classic game in years, it's never too late to start!

I'm still quite good with space. As I bought the 12TB NAS, (10TB in Raid5), I almost ran already out of space, NAS only had some 800GB free space. So I decided to clean it up a bit, as inside my PC I also still have 10TB (5x2TB), which were quite empty, as I'm hosting most stuff on the NAS.

As I realyy had still one HDD inside which was empty, I moved my PS3 games collection to it, which is backed up anyway on my external HDD connected to the PS3, and that were already 1.4TB, so the NAS is again a bit more empty.

I also cleaned up some of my collections, f.ex. what was the point of having a 75GB ScummVM collection, if 98% of the games are also present in the ExoDOS collections? What's the point of keeping over 100GB of japanese Dreamcast games? What's the point of having the Passigar collection, which was again the same like ScummVM. I had PC scene releases stocked, around 250GB, so I tested some games, they were all really crap, and the only ones that were actually good, were the ones I had downloaded to another PC game collection anyway.

I cross checked many of my sets/collections, and I found a lot of duplicates. One thing that I also get rid of, was if I had f.ex. a game which was in the same collection existing as "floppy DOS", "Windows CD", "Amiga disk", "Atari disk"... What's the point of keeping all the "duplicate files", if ALL of them are also existing in my Amiga/Atari collections?

It was really a lot of work to go through everything, and I'm not finished yet. I also want to eliminate all the duplicate games in the smaller collection sets, as f.ex. the C64 set, where most of the games are present several times, some of them over 10 times. They are then f.ex. in different languages, alpha/beta versions, with/without trainer, aso. I don't need all that stuff.

But at the moment I freed about 2TB on my NAS, and there's again 2.8TB available. A lot of space are taking f.ex. my series in HD, or movies either in 1080p or the 3D ones. Music and pictures are definitely not a problem.

Inside the PC I have 1 HDD where I keep my MAME stuff, plus all the Pinball collections, Future Pinball, PinMAME and Visual PinMAME, and they are mirrored manually from time to time to a second HDD inside. Another disk holds my booting partition, plus everything gaming, like temporary download/unpacking/patching folders, mainly for PS3 stuff.

And another disk is for music, and where movies/series get downloaded or ripped and then processed further to put on the NAS to use with my mediaplayer.

I really need to clean up some of my rom/iso sets too. Expecially DOS sets as I've got loads of different ones scattered over different drives.

The only real reason for keeping duplicate sets is when needing to update them via torrentzip as it will flag all the missing files when joining the newer torrent to try to download them all again, so you will need to go through the new torrent and disable all the files you don't want downloaded. That however also then means it can't be seeded as it won't be a full set.

But yeah, I agree that it is very annoying having so many duplicate files in multiple sets. I don't bother so much with the Good sets any more because most of their content is mirrored in the Tosec sets. But where a set is emulator specific I do like to have the complete sets, even if they contain duplicates from other sets, as it means the emulator will find a complete 100% set and be able to run them all perfectly.

Saying that, my emulation system has been out of action for a bit. My old emulation PC was running my old Athlon 64 setup, but when I built a new i7 PC earlier in the year I decided the existing Q6600 main PC could then become the emulation PC, so I sold the Athlon 64 setup. However although I have the Q6600 setup all installed and setup in its case and running properly, and all the emulation set HDDs are connected, it doesn't currently have a boot drive installed. I've noticed small SSDs are now really cheap, so I might stick one of those in there for fast booting as I don't intent to be installing much more than the actual OS onto the boot drive, so it should be good.

BTW, have you noticed SSDs are finally starting to fall in price? You can get a 60GB SSD for £32. I did consider one when I built my current main PC, but because I wanted Windows 7 which already takes quite some space up in addition to needed the Adobe Master Collection and other software installed even a 128GB SSD would have been too small. But the small 60GB SSDs can be used as cache drives and my main PC motherboard supports using one for that purpose. Tempting.

Anyone own a SSD yet?

The other thing that keeps putting me off from SSDs is reliability and lifespan. So many people I know that work in IT departments of larger companies have said they have seen large numbers of SSD failures.

@DC. Do you use any SSDs at work? And if so what experiences have you had with them?

If you haven't played a classic game in years, it's never too late to start!

The only real reason for keeping duplicate sets is when needing to update them via torrentzip as it will flag all the missing files when joining the newer torrent to try to download them all again, so you will need to go through the new torrent and disable all the files you don't want downloaded. That however also then means it can't be seeded as it won't be a full set.

The main reason for doing so is that I don't update many sets anymore. There's nothing new coming in f.ex. a C64 or ZX Spectrum set, they are quite complete. So I don't bother to update them. And this is kinda true for a lot of (older) system sets. I lately also went through some sets with Clrmamepro to get rid of duplicate or renamed files, that also saved some space. It's sometimes annoying when they give some sets an overhaul, and just rename them. With bigger sets it can then take an enormous amount of time to fix.

I never used SSD in my life so far, and also at work we don't have any, at least not me. My PC at home is running 24/7, so it basically only gets restarted with some new software or a Windows update, which is not quite often. So I really don't bother about SSD (yet).

I kinda got forced into SSD with my new Rig. Faced with crap PCIe layout options on the new Z77 Platfrom, I ended up with the Asus P8Z77-V Premium board. This board comes fitted with a 32GB mSATA SSD device from the factory & boots to desktop in around 10 seconds. I have it set up as a dedicated drive and is nothing more than the Boot partition for my system. 32GB is small for your average user, but I always run lean installs anyhow, so with Hibernation Off & the Swap file elsewhere, I have still have about 16GB free. Looking @ upgrade options for mSSD, I can get a 120GB OCZ affair for about £71 delivered. Overall, yes SSD is now getting cheaper, though the Industry is still hammering the High End users for the faster devices.

Other drives on my System are 3 x 500GB 7200.12 Barracudas in RAID0; 1 x 3TB Barracuda & 1 x 2TB Barracuda as a floating drive. Spends most of it's time in a Docking bay for file & Movie transfers.

Must do a write up on this new Rig H. It's MASSIVELY impressive compared to where I was with X58. 1Mb SuperPi in less than 7.457 Sceonds & 3DMark Vantage scores to simply die for.